It’s no secret that industry funds such efforts today: An investigation in June, for example, showed how the National Confectioners Association worked with a nutrition professor at Louisiana State University to conclude that kids who eat sugar are thinner than those who don’t.

An article by University of California-San Francisco researchers, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, shows how far back such efforts go: In 1965, the Sugar Research Foundation, the precursor to today’s Sugar Association, paid Harvard scientists to discredit a link now widely accepted among scientists – that consuming sugar can raise the risk of cardiovascular disease. Instead, the industry and the Harvard scientists pinned the blame squarely, and only, on saturated fat.

A recent study published in the Journal of Water and Health examined links between water fluoridation and diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is a growing epidemic in the United States. Incidence rates have nearly quadrupled in the past 32 years and show no signs of stopping. According to the study, fluoridation with sodium fluoride could be a contributing factor to diabetes rates in the United States, as the chemical is a known preservative of blood glucose….

Digging deeper revealed differences between the types of fluoride additives used by each region. The additives linked to diabetes in the analyses included sodium fluoride and sodium fluorosilicate…. Counties that relied on naturally occurring fluoride in their water and did not supplement with fluoride additives also had lower diabetes rates.

Yesterday, NASA announced a massive new public project that will make all of its publicly funded research available online for free. A new portal, Pubspace, will host thousands of NASA research articles on topics like the toxicity of lunar dust or the make up of Earth’s early atmosphere.

This resource appears three years after the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directed NASA to share more of its research with the public. Before, most NASA papers were only available behind a paywall. The new policy requires any research funded by NASA to appear on Pubspace within a year.

Of course, there are exceptions. Research relating to national security or to patents is exempt from this new rule. But there are already 850 articles of fascinating discoveries up on the site for the taking, and that number will increase with time.

“Making our research data easier to access will greatly magnify the impact of our research,” Ellen Stofan, NASA’s Chief Scientist, said in a statement. “As scientists and engineers, we work by building upon a foundation laid by others.”

Of course, drone strikes were always more about convenience than effectiveness… Because this is a question of counterterrorism, maintaining Obama’s drone war becomes outright dangerous to U.S. security. To be sure, the president is unlikely to admit the failure of his signature tactic before he leaves office in January, but for the next president, a reexamination of our drone war’s effectiveness should be at the top of the to-do list.

As the nation reels from a series of high-profile fatal shootings of black men by police officers, many have decried the lack of readily available data on how racial bias factors into American policing. But while it’s true that there is no adequate federal database of fatal police shootings, there exists a wealth of academic research, official and media investigations, and court rulings on the topic of race and law enforcement.

Salk Institute scientists have found preliminary evidence that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and other compounds found in marijuana can promote the cellular removal of amyloid beta, a toxic protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Cholesterol does not cause heart disease in the elderly and trying to reduce it with drugs like statins is a waste of time, an international group of experts has claimed.

A review of research involving nearly 70,000 people found there was no link between what has traditionally been considered “bad” cholesterol and the premature deaths of over 60-year-olds from cardiovascular disease.

Published in the BMJ Open journal, the new study found that 92 percent of people with a high cholesterol level lived longer.